I have a very important note to all the dear sweet wonderful so-called cat people in my life: Please shut up about your dumb cats.
I do not care about your cats. At all. I do not care that Fluffy “talks” to you when you come home from work. I do not care that Mr. Spaghetti likes to jump on the table and tries to eat with you because he “thinks he’s people.” Or, that Rumply Dumply was “mad” at you this morning because you forgot to give him “kissey-wisseys.”
First of all, none of these are true. That cat has a brain the size of a walnut (if that). He has no idea what you are doing or saying, or even who the hell you are. That cat spends the entire day sitting in a window sill, mesmerized by things as meaningless as house flies in between taking breaks from licking its own butt for hours on end and is probably genuinely shocked that A) it has a butt, and B) things periodically come out of it.
(This is where I will get letters and phone calls decrying this column. “But my Max is actually really smart, he actually knows what’s going on.” No he doesn’t. No. Absolutely. He. Does. Not.)
I have a dear friend (I won’t reveal who she is) who is a college-educated successful career woman with many enviable traits. She is attractive, funny, smart, and friendly. I have no idea exactly what went wrong in her life, but somewhere along the line she acquired three cats. And she insists on emailing me about these cats.
The emails contain long didactic descriptions with a heated verbal tenacity rivaling the Unabomber manifesto. Last week, I read three paragraphs that described the “battle” between her “feisty cat named Ashy” and the tassels on the living room curtains. The Sunday edition of The New York Times contained less writing about the conflict in Yemen. (Did I mention this woman has an actual college degree?) I don’t even want to hear that much about my own family members. Hey [REDACTED], I love you girl, but please, please, stop writing to me about your damn cats. Unless your cat miraculously comes up with a way to pick the winning lotto numbers every week, please leave me out of its daily habits.
And to be honest, the cat doesn’t really need my two cents on the matter, either. I don’t think that cat is sitting around your house thinking gee, I wonder what that idiot writer thinks about how long I sucked on my own toe today? I hope someone tells her so that I may contemplate her opinions and perhaps scribe a witty retort on one of my many social media accounts. Oh joy, won’t that be fun.
Cats are not even real pets. What they are, actually, is a secret paramilitary order of highly coordinated agents—an evil cabal known only as the Cat Overlords who have for hundreds of years integrated themselves into human life under the guise of feline companionship. But what they’ve really done is secretly enslaved humanity. They have fooled humans into becoming their zombie workforce, and I am literally the only one who seems to know the truth.
I mean, come on. That bizarrely hostile, shedding hissball poops in a box in your house (the very house you work hard day and night to pay for) and then expects you to clean it out or face the very real consequence of finding cat poop in your favorite pair of shoes. Or your bed. Or worse.
I fully expect to get a lot of your hate mail for my stance on cats. I promise to answer every single one of you cat lovers, mostly with questions about your mental well-being and suggestions that you print out your complaints and use it to line that gross poop box that you have for some strange reason decided to keep in your home.
Oh, by the way, if you are a single woman and you insist on putting up pictures of your seven cats on your Match, Tinder, or eHarmony profile pages, just go ahead and start planning to spend the rest of your life living alone in a mobile home on the outskirts of some isolated town watching DVDs of Murder She Wrote and gorging yourself on Toblerone and Goldschlager, because you have about as much of a chance of marrying a normal man as you do of winning the Finnish lottery. Seriously. Nicole Kidman couldn’t land a man using pictures of her cats.
Unless you want to die surrounded by piles of kitty litter and unread Lillian Vernon catalogs, please, please, please take down the pictures of the cats and put something up that will actually attract a sane male mate. Try monster trucks with huge wheels or anything that makes people fart, like beer or stinky cheeses. You’ll be married in six weeks.
Rebecca Rose once had her heart broken by a cat named Mr. T and clearly has not gotten over it. Contact her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.