Meow
The first cat that ever channeled the spirit of their namesake for me was Sagan.
Sagan was thin and grey, from a litter that a friend from college's cat turned out. There was something about his eyes, somber and thoughtful, that appealed to me, and from the first time I saw him with those eyes open, as a tiny kitten still nursing, he used them to look up. I felt like he wanted to see into the sky, so I named him after the recently-passed astronomer. (I'd been watching all of COSMOS again.) Sagan was perfectly fine as cats go. Not the first I'd had, so no surprise of any sort… that is, until the day he spoke to me in my head. He wanted to talk to me about quasars. In fact, he had a fair amount of new material on the subject, new theoretical progress and some "better math" (as he put it) that he'd been "free to work on without interruption" since, no kidding, his passing. At first, I thought I was insane. Then, I thought, why not run with it, since if I'm mad, there's precious little to be done about it now. So I started trying to converse back (which mostly worked most of the time) and writing what he said down (as best I could). Then I checked it against available sources on the nascent World Wide Web, and asked questions in a couple of astrophysics Usenet groups, and came to the scary conclusion that this cat was, at the very least, talking quite correctly about stuff that I myself did not and could not know.
But what to do about the new theoretical stuff? I couldn't take it to anyone as my own work; I wasn't qualified to defend it or explain it or do anything, in fact, but parrot it. Nor was it my own work, anyway! But I couldn't tell people my cat was coming up with it, either. Nor could I realistically claim I'd somehow found a cache of unpublished work by the late astronomer. Ultimately, the best I could do was trickle bits and pieces of speculative ideas to a couple friends of mine who were doing physics grad work at Stanford and hope that it found its way to useful publication somewhere under someone's name. Meanwhile, Sagan's health began to fail for reasons that the vet was never really able to pin down, and eventually that somber and thoughtful light went out from his eyes.
Not long after, my friend Jeff's cat, Edison, wanted to start talking about electricity whenever I was over. Later, they had Tesla as well, and those two would just go at it in my brain, fight and fight and fight about step-up voltage and insulators and coil dynamics.
And there have been others. James and Gina, they have Kafka, who was actually not all that surprised to wake up one morning and find himself in the body of a cat. Funny as hell, when he's not napping.
Even though they only speak in my head, they never do it when other people are around. So with other folks' cats, there's rarely much time to document anything they say, which just breaks my heart - all this amazing talent that the world has lost, now with an opportunity to somehow make their voices heard by us once again, if only they can get a chance to talk to me undisturbed.
Obviously, it's time for me to start having cats of my own again, to get a bunch of them and name them appropriately, to channel these great departed spirits for the benefit of the world once again.
So that's where you come in. Food and water here, litter there, scratching post by the door. Whatever you need, is yours. Let's do this thing.
Welcome to my humble abode, Jesus.
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For consideration: there isn't some other famous Jesus in history that I'm going to get instead is there?
Sagan was thin and grey, from a litter that a friend from college's cat turned out. There was something about his eyes, somber and thoughtful, that appealed to me, and from the first time I saw him with those eyes open, as a tiny kitten still nursing, he used them to look up. I felt like he wanted to see into the sky, so I named him after the recently-passed astronomer. (I'd been watching all of COSMOS again.) Sagan was perfectly fine as cats go. Not the first I'd had, so no surprise of any sort… that is, until the day he spoke to me in my head. He wanted to talk to me about quasars. In fact, he had a fair amount of new material on the subject, new theoretical progress and some "better math" (as he put it) that he'd been "free to work on without interruption" since, no kidding, his passing. At first, I thought I was insane. Then, I thought, why not run with it, since if I'm mad, there's precious little to be done about it now. So I started trying to converse back (which mostly worked most of the time) and writing what he said down (as best I could). Then I checked it against available sources on the nascent World Wide Web, and asked questions in a couple of astrophysics Usenet groups, and came to the scary conclusion that this cat was, at the very least, talking quite correctly about stuff that I myself did not and could not know.
But what to do about the new theoretical stuff? I couldn't take it to anyone as my own work; I wasn't qualified to defend it or explain it or do anything, in fact, but parrot it. Nor was it my own work, anyway! But I couldn't tell people my cat was coming up with it, either. Nor could I realistically claim I'd somehow found a cache of unpublished work by the late astronomer. Ultimately, the best I could do was trickle bits and pieces of speculative ideas to a couple friends of mine who were doing physics grad work at Stanford and hope that it found its way to useful publication somewhere under someone's name. Meanwhile, Sagan's health began to fail for reasons that the vet was never really able to pin down, and eventually that somber and thoughtful light went out from his eyes.
Not long after, my friend Jeff's cat, Edison, wanted to start talking about electricity whenever I was over. Later, they had Tesla as well, and those two would just go at it in my brain, fight and fight and fight about step-up voltage and insulators and coil dynamics.
And there have been others. James and Gina, they have Kafka, who was actually not all that surprised to wake up one morning and find himself in the body of a cat. Funny as hell, when he's not napping.
Even though they only speak in my head, they never do it when other people are around. So with other folks' cats, there's rarely much time to document anything they say, which just breaks my heart - all this amazing talent that the world has lost, now with an opportunity to somehow make their voices heard by us once again, if only they can get a chance to talk to me undisturbed.
Obviously, it's time for me to start having cats of my own again, to get a bunch of them and name them appropriately, to channel these great departed spirits for the benefit of the world once again.
So that's where you come in. Food and water here, litter there, scratching post by the door. Whatever you need, is yours. Let's do this thing.
Welcome to my humble abode, Jesus.
------
For consideration: there isn't some other famous Jesus in history that I'm going to get instead is there?