Like a Cat out of Hell Pt. II

I slept at my friends' house last night. They're on their honeymoon, so I'm rabbit sitting. Unlike my cat friend from the previous post, Sugar the rabbit does not try to kill me in my sleep. That coupled with the fact that my friends with the rabbit own season 3 of Frazier on DVD made the decision to stay over pretty easy.

When I came home this morning, Cat did not immediately come strutting out of my bedroom to say hello. I found this puzzling since he normally likes to lull me into a false sense of security when he first sees me. I walked into my kitchen to check on his food situation and found the above wreckage. I know this seems pretty cut and dry. He climbed above my cabinets, knocked over the bottle of Pernod which then landed on his food bowl, causing said food bowl to shatter. Here's the problem with that. Say the wall in my kitchen is ten feet long. The food bowl is at foot 0 while the Pernod bottle is at foot 4. How the fuck did this cat catapult the Pernod bottle 4 feet east? Does he have opposable thumbs? Did he knock it over then roll it down to the end of the cabinet before tossing it over? How did the bottle survive an 8 foot fall without breaking? Strange things are afoot is what I'm saying.

After I noticed the situation, I immediately panicked that my friend's cat's corpse, having bled to death, was going to have to be ferreted out from under my bed. This is not a phone call you want to make. "Hey friend, remember how you said your cat would find a way up on my cabinets and I stubbornly decided not to take the bottles down? Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is, you were right. Good for you for having such prophetic psychic abilities. The bad news is, I killed your cat. Fear not, I have a friend who owns a pet cemetery, and I'm sure once I explain the situation to her, she'll give you a good rate. Will you still be my friend?" I was thinking this and planning my escape to Mexico when Cat came around the corner, limbs in tact and both eyes in their respective sockets. As I write this, he's drinking out of my toilet.

And now I take the bottles down.

Like a Cat out of Hell

Look at that shifty-eyed little nix-nux to the right. I'm cat sitting this special little guy, and he's causing me to behave in ways I would never behave otherwise.

I keep these empty booze bottles lined up above my kitchen cabinets. For the last four days el gato has been trying to figure out how to get to these bottles. My concern is that I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of something shattering and that I will come into the kitchen to find broken glass and a profusely bleeding cat sprawled across my kitchen floor.

People tend not to trust you when you kill their loved ones, even if the loved one in question is a trouble maker. I know the obvious solution is to get rid of the fucking bottles. More specifically, the obvious solution is to come to terms with the fact that I am a 27-year-old woman and not a frat boy and that empty bourbon bottles are not art.

You know how after 9.11, people kept doing shit in the name of not letting the terrorists win. Musicians the country over were all, "I thought about canceling the show, but then I realized that if I canceled this concert, the terrorists will have won." This is, of course, complete and utter malarky. People trying to make themselves feel justified in their selfish decision to move on with life by playing for the door. Anyway, if I take down the bottles, not only has the cat won, but also he has not learned a lesson. Since I was specifically told that the cat should be returned a better cat than he was when he was dropped off, the bottles are staying put.

Back to the story. A few minutes ago, cat figured out that the hood over the stove is wide enough and sturdy enough to support his weight. He jumped from the floor to the stove top to the hood and finally, victory of all victories, on top of the cabinets to my own little Jim Beam graveyard.

The thing is, when I took the cat, I meant to ask for the spray bottle. Most cats don't like getting wet, so spraying them with a light mist can be at once horrible and surprisingly refreshing. Sadly though, I did not actually go through with asking for the spray bottle. I thought to myself, Carrie, you're a 27-year-old woman. You should have a spray bottle. Play it cool. Don't let on that you don't have a spray bottle. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Well, with cat running back and forth behind the bottles like a feline possessed, I was staring at the bridge. Here's where we get to the part where I'm doing shit that I would never do. I turned on my faucet, pulled out the spray hose, and doused that little fucker. Yeah, it occurred to me that maybe I didn't want to get my ceiling, cabinets, and wall soaking wet. It also occurred to me that if I scared cat bad enough, he might panic and inadvertently knock over a bottle and hurt himself, which was the thing we were trying to avoid. Well, he did panic, and all my shit did get wet, and now it seems like he's not speaking to me. It also seems that I've turned into the kind of person who blogs about their cat, or, sadder still, someone else's cat. Shit, maybe the cat has won after all.