The Sinister Side of Cat Ownership
Terri-ちゃん (cutiepi314) asked me for a new song about cat vomit for her birthday. (That's an unusual commission, even for me.) Alack and alas, of the hundred catchy tunes running through my head courtesy of chillyrodent's 80s compilation and certain Christmas gifts, not one lends itself to adaptation for cat barf lyrics. Instead, I hope she'll accept this true story that occurred just this morning.
As the light of dawn slowly brightened our bedroom, there arose from somewhere a raucous salvo of "Huk! Huk! Huk! Huk!" Judging from the energetic crackling and snapping of vertebrae, as the cat spine was wrenched into fantastic shapes by the recoil, it had to be Pandora. The retching continued. For...a...long...time. Must be a hell of a hairball, I mused, in the twilight of sleep. A bit of aural triangulation revealed that Pandora wasn't on the bed, and since what wasn't deposited on the bed could wait, I relaxed and gradually drifted back to sleep, storing the memory as a warning to exercise caution when I got up later.
It turned out that by the time I really woke up I'd forgotten all about it. In the bathroom I encountered a diminutive, comma-shaped blot of cat bile, and the recollection of the morning's dry heaves suddenly came flooding back. Why, I mused, would she have fought so long and arduously for that? A quick swipe with three squares of toilet paper and it was gone.
After performing my morning ablutions, I shuffled back to the bedroom, still well short of full consciousness. (Showering and grooming have become habituated to the point that my autonomic nervous system takes care of most of the routine. A good thing, too, because my higher cognitive functions don't come on line for a good half hour after I'm forced to get up.) I wrangled a fresh pair of socks from the dresser and walked over to the bed to put them on. SQUISH!
Few things on this green Earth engender such immediate and potent dismay as the sensation of cold, semiliquid cat puke welling up through the cracks between one's toes. Pandora had deployed the main barf, a gigantic soggy hairball in a vast, sticky lake of brown mucus, right next to the bed where it would be mostly hidden from view by the comforter draping over the side, yet still easily accessible to the unwary plodding foot. I screamed in terror and hopped as though mad back to the shower for a five minutes of rinsing my foot and sobbing hysterically. The goo stuck to my right sole like hot caramel, and it was about that color.
After that, my first impulse was to throttle that stupid cat, who incidentally greeted my return to the bedroom with a look of consummate innocence. Instead, I merely shouted at her, "Thanks for the barf, Pandora! I really needed that! Now I'm nice and wide awake and ready to face the day!!" I stomped over to the closet to fetch my clothes.
SPLAT.
I'd been so distracted with disgust and anger that the fact that the vomit was exactly the same color as our hardwood floors had completely escaped me. As it happened, I'd made a beeline from the primary pile-o'-bile directly afoul of the inevitable satellite barf. If my first, earlier scream had sounded a bit too ladylike for a baritone like me, my second far outshone it; I probed the very ionosphere of the human voice. This time I held my foot under the spout until we ran out of hot water.
Constantly sweeping the floor with my eyes, I crept back to our bedroom and looked around-carefully. All morning I'd been walking amidst a camouflaged minefield. Barves everywhere. As bad as I'd had it up to this moment, my fate could have been worse.
Pandora, with one colossal, emetic stroke, has catapulted Boltzmann's constant directly from the new classification of Minimal all the way to Ridiculous-which conveniently matches how I feel telling this story. But it had to be told: if not for cutiepi314's amusement, then for the enjoyment of cat lovers everywhere.
Postscript: I spoke too early in pronouncing my lack of a new cat barf song. On our way to lunch I was griping about my Pandora-puke misadvanture; and Kathy started singing the perfect song commemorating this incident. Long ago samwibatt and I saw an an animated short based on a folk song about the insidious black flies that plague northern Canada during the summer. The chorus goes like this:
The black flies, the little back flies,
Always a black fly, wherever you go
I'll die with the black flies a-pickin' my bones
In north Ontar-i-o-i-o, in north Ontar-i-o.
And here is what we eventually sang. Kathy belted out a near-perfect version on the first try, extemporaneously!
Cat barf, the little cat's barf,
Always a cat barf wherever I go
Gonna die with the cat barf a-squished in my toes,
In northeast Ohi-o-i-o, in northeast Ohi-o.
As the light of dawn slowly brightened our bedroom, there arose from somewhere a raucous salvo of "Huk! Huk! Huk! Huk!" Judging from the energetic crackling and snapping of vertebrae, as the cat spine was wrenched into fantastic shapes by the recoil, it had to be Pandora. The retching continued. For...a...long...time. Must be a hell of a hairball, I mused, in the twilight of sleep. A bit of aural triangulation revealed that Pandora wasn't on the bed, and since what wasn't deposited on the bed could wait, I relaxed and gradually drifted back to sleep, storing the memory as a warning to exercise caution when I got up later.
It turned out that by the time I really woke up I'd forgotten all about it. In the bathroom I encountered a diminutive, comma-shaped blot of cat bile, and the recollection of the morning's dry heaves suddenly came flooding back. Why, I mused, would she have fought so long and arduously for that? A quick swipe with three squares of toilet paper and it was gone.
After performing my morning ablutions, I shuffled back to the bedroom, still well short of full consciousness. (Showering and grooming have become habituated to the point that my autonomic nervous system takes care of most of the routine. A good thing, too, because my higher cognitive functions don't come on line for a good half hour after I'm forced to get up.) I wrangled a fresh pair of socks from the dresser and walked over to the bed to put them on. SQUISH!
Few things on this green Earth engender such immediate and potent dismay as the sensation of cold, semiliquid cat puke welling up through the cracks between one's toes. Pandora had deployed the main barf, a gigantic soggy hairball in a vast, sticky lake of brown mucus, right next to the bed where it would be mostly hidden from view by the comforter draping over the side, yet still easily accessible to the unwary plodding foot. I screamed in terror and hopped as though mad back to the shower for a five minutes of rinsing my foot and sobbing hysterically. The goo stuck to my right sole like hot caramel, and it was about that color.
After that, my first impulse was to throttle that stupid cat, who incidentally greeted my return to the bedroom with a look of consummate innocence. Instead, I merely shouted at her, "Thanks for the barf, Pandora! I really needed that! Now I'm nice and wide awake and ready to face the day!!" I stomped over to the closet to fetch my clothes.
SPLAT.
I'd been so distracted with disgust and anger that the fact that the vomit was exactly the same color as our hardwood floors had completely escaped me. As it happened, I'd made a beeline from the primary pile-o'-bile directly afoul of the inevitable satellite barf. If my first, earlier scream had sounded a bit too ladylike for a baritone like me, my second far outshone it; I probed the very ionosphere of the human voice. This time I held my foot under the spout until we ran out of hot water.
Constantly sweeping the floor with my eyes, I crept back to our bedroom and looked around-carefully. All morning I'd been walking amidst a camouflaged minefield. Barves everywhere. As bad as I'd had it up to this moment, my fate could have been worse.
Pandora, with one colossal, emetic stroke, has catapulted Boltzmann's constant directly from the new classification of Minimal all the way to Ridiculous-which conveniently matches how I feel telling this story. But it had to be told: if not for cutiepi314's amusement, then for the enjoyment of cat lovers everywhere.
Postscript: I spoke too early in pronouncing my lack of a new cat barf song. On our way to lunch I was griping about my Pandora-puke misadvanture; and Kathy started singing the perfect song commemorating this incident. Long ago samwibatt and I saw an an animated short based on a folk song about the insidious black flies that plague northern Canada during the summer. The chorus goes like this:
The black flies, the little back flies,
Always a black fly, wherever you go
I'll die with the black flies a-pickin' my bones
In north Ontar-i-o-i-o, in north Ontar-i-o.
And here is what we eventually sang. Kathy belted out a near-perfect version on the first try, extemporaneously!
Cat barf, the little cat's barf,
Always a cat barf wherever I go
Gonna die with the cat barf a-squished in my toes,
In northeast Ohi-o-i-o, in northeast Ohi-o.