(Okay, so it's not just lately that I've been a largely-humorless, self-centered twit, but it does seem like I've upped it a notch in recent months, although dark humor is clearly never going to fledge from this bloggish nest.)
Since it's going to take me a long, long while to work through my almost two years' worth of ramblings to fully categorize my past funny—at least, to me—blathers, I've decided to kick things off by reworking one that probably never got its humorous due, buried as it originally was under a sad introduction. Although what may be funniest here is that I just typed "do" instead of "due." Ouch.
Anyway, without (further)
How My Cat Saved My Life
When she was old enough to qualify as an actual cat but still young enough to behave like a kitten, Little Gray, along with Old Lady Cat—who was then still young herself, though enough older than Little Gray to regard her with patent disdain most of the time—and I moved to a spacious but slightly creepy one-bedroom apartment in a new town. The apartment was to be a temporary home for the summer, or perhaps just a bit longer, while I started a new job in the new town and my husband finished up an old job in the old town, until he could join me in the new town and we could find a new home there.I picked the place because I liked the kitchen and the high ceilings, which in the living room were seeing piles of our belongings rise up to meet them, but which in the bedroom just echoed, because I kept that space as "normal" as I could, given the necessary chaos of the living room. I didn't like the fact that a psycho apparently resided upstairs, but I will grant that I do not actually know that this person was insane, and might be unfairly judging him based on the day that he was hauled away, screaming, and snugly encased in a straightjacket.
I sometimes wonder if that was the turning point in Little Gray's antisocial development, because it certainly seemed like she certainly was much more of a single-person cat after we left that nuthouse apartment than she seemed inclined to become prior to that. But I digress.
Anyway, aside from the wild screamer-man—to be fair to him, I only heard him that one time, but to be fair to me, he crammed a wealth of freaky-feeling into that single incident—we were quite content, and even comfortable, in ye olde high-ceilinged, cool-kitchened apartment. Where things weren't quite up to par, I didn't mind making a few minor modifications. For example, I was a bit leery of the ancient locks in the building, and because of that—and the fact that the bedroom door didn't even have a lock of its own—I'd liberated a 2x4 from the basement (aka laundry, aka miscellaneous storage dump) to secure the bedroom door at night.
Yeah, between that and the Super Soaker® I kept fully loaded beside the bed, I was one bad-ass of a crazy person myself. Okay, so the Super Soaker was really for Little Gray, who had strange tendency to try to open doors, especially during the night. She knew that doorknob had something to do with it, so she'd sit under the doorknob and JUMP up, dragging her claws noisily down the door as she invariably slid, failing once again to unravel the mystery of doorknob operation. And it didn't really matter to her which side of the door she was on ... she inevitably wanted to be on the OTHER side at some point during the active—for her—night hours, and I (erroneously) concluded that if she was going to be obnoxious about it, I might be able to "train" her to stop it entirely, with the aid of my super-soaking, cat-training implement of drenched fur.
But as it turned out, Little Gray was far from deterred, and due to my door-jamming efforts, had an even easier route to the doorknob now. She marched right up to the top of the 2x4 where it was crammed underneath the doorknob, and continued to conduct her mad cat-scientist experiments. She'd smack the doorknob with her paw, or rub against it, or who knew WHAT, because around about half-past REM-sleep, it's hard to tell WTF is going on between cat and doorknob, and it was far easier to simply grab the Super Soaker and aim a blast in her general direction ... until she caught on, which was precisely 2.1 milliseconds after the very first time I tried it. *sigh*
Very late one night, I was awakened from a particularly deep sleep—tragically rare in those 2x4-implementing days—by a strange sound coming from the bathroom. It was distinctly ... well, INdistinct, and besides that, it was decidedly unusual, too. (Yeah, well, YOU try for clarity after playing with a fast-moving, door-opening-wannabe cat bandit for weeks on end and let's just see how clear and succinct YOU are, buddy!) A quick glance at the door showed that my makeshift brace remained in place, and from her dignified curl in a PROPER cat basket-bed, Old Lady Cat only blinked her big, inscrutable cateyes at my bleary, bloodshot confusion, seemingly unconcerned by the ominous rustling emanating from the "nightlight"-illuminated bathroom.
I sat up in bed, flush with the fear that comes with awakening, alone, to a strange noise whose origin one canNOT manage to determine. I mentally debated picking up the Super Soaker, but surely there couldn't be ANYone but me and my furry companions in the apartment; you know, with the door BARRICADED by my paranoid ass (or, more accurately, by the 2x4 I'd selected, my paranoid ass entering the picture only because it's attached to the rest of my paranoid self). Besides, the Super Soaker might be an effective weapon against nocturnal noise-makers of the feline persuasion, but I doubted its efficacy in dissuading a ... phantom that was sorting papers in my bathroom? barricade-replacing, potty-seeking intruder?
W.
T.
F.
?
I simply could NOT imagine who was in my bathroom, much less WHAT they were doing, and that was pretty damn scary in and of itself, because my by-now very WELL-provoked imagination—which generally functions all too well, even with little to no provocation—was thoroughly engaged, and there was no chance of convincing myself that the sounds were "nothing" and returning to my dramatically-interrupted slumber.
With no particular plan in mind, I gathered up what little courage I possessed, along with my night attire, and nervously made my way, as silently as possible, towards the bathroom. I couldn't see into the room, except for an occasional shadowy movement, for the door was mostly shut—that's how I got a "nightlight" out of the ancient, ugly old bathroom light fixture, and I HAD to have a nightlight due to the fact that I still wasn't accustomed enough to the apartment to find my way to the bathroom without ANY light, and there wasn't a single useful outlet in that damn bathroom.
The eerie sounds were fitful, unlike the increasingly loud pounding of my heart, as I cautiously approached. There was the rustling that continued to defy my scared/sleepy attempts to classify it by origin. Intermixed with that were brief, seemingly random silences, and intermixed with THAT were alarming THUMPS, followed by more rustling. I knew there was someone ... someTHING? ... in my bathroom, but my feeble, hyperactive mind was still too burdened by the sleep it had been rousted from for me to realize that while I had seen Old Lady Cat, I had not yet seen Little Gray.
The short expanse of space from my bed to the bathroom door seemed to stretch out far longer than it ever had before, but finally, I reached out and pushed the door open ... and the scene before me was so bizarre, so beyond anything I had imagined or could possibly conjure out of the darkest recesses of my mind even under the most alert of circumstances, that it took a timeless moment of stunned disbelief before I realized what was actually going on. And then? Well, then all I could do was laugh my ass off, so hard and so loudly that I had to clasp my hands over my mouth, lest my neighbors be compelled to dial 9-1-1 and arrange a straightjacket for ME ...
There, beside the bathroom cabinet that she must have opened by repeatedly batting at it with her paw—a trick I'd seen her perform in the kitchen—was Little Gray. She looked up at me, clearly startled, and dropped her "kill," which she'd been holding in her mouth. It landed amongst the many others that had fallen to her superior skill and hunting prowess, lying white and motionless with its brethren, who were laid out all the way from one end of the bathroom horizon to the other.
My brilliant little hunter had slaughtered a pack of wild tampons. They lay in their still-mostly-intact, delightfully-rustley wrappers like a herd of vanquished ... well, not like anything else in the world, really. And I was instantaneously transported from fear to shock to laughter, and then to a sweetly safe place far beyond the realm of new apartments and 2x4s and nameless Things that go THUMP in the night. There simply isn't any way to adequately convey the immensity of the security I felt and the pride that swelled up within me when I saw that my dear little cat could and WOULD defend me against my sneaky, vicious-attack-minded feminine hygiene supply.
Words may have failed me, but my smothered laughter had spoken volumes. Little Gray was not offended by my reaction to her rampage, but meowed proudly and pranced to my side, stepping neatly over the carcasses of the paper-encased villains she'd butchered in my honor.
And, of course, she purred when I picked her up and cuddled her.
2 comments:
You are regularly funny but that was especially hilarious! Glad she kept you safe!
Renée, So glad you enjoyed it! :-D
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