The Irony of Cats and My Life

I have, in my lifetime, owned nine cats. Ten if you count the stray Pete and I tried to adopt before our hateful, anti-people, anti-animal landlady kidnapped him (her?) and shipped him away.

I received the first of those nine cats while I was living in Fayetteville, NC, in 2003, I think, from my girlfriend at the time. She had caught Lancelot in her old neighborhood and brought him to me. He was a doll, I must say... big eyes, scared shitless of my dog, Jax, and loved to attack my toes and my eyelids while I slept (the latter of which is quite frightening when you think about it). I didn't have him long. A stupid fight led to Lancelot running away in the middle of a golf course. I found him a few weeks later, but by then he had been acclimated to running with the other feral cats... and besides, some old lady was taking care of him.

My next two cats were Galahad and Guinevere (noticing a pattern?). I was to pick up Galahad as part of my apology for scaring Lancelot away, but when I got to where I was to get him, I noticed Guinevere. She looked a lot like Lancelot, which was one of the reasons I picked her up. Little did I know that this decision would turn my household into a fucking zoo. Galahad ran away shortly after I moved to Wilmington, NC, in August or September of 2004. He just really wanted to go home to Fayetteville, I think. He ran out of the house while I was shooting a student film. One of my buddies offered to chase him down, but I assured him that Galahad would come back. I was wrong. At the time, Galahad was my favorite cat.

Guinevere ran away while I was stuck in Dayton, NV, this past June. I saw her out the window, walking by my dad's truck. Had I known that was the last time I'd have seen her, I'd have went outside to play with her one last time. At the time, she, like Galahad, was my favorite.

While still in Fayetteville, Galahad and Guinevere had a litter of four cats. We named them Gawain, Tristan, Merlin, and Vivianne. Merlin and Vivianne were given to my roommate at the time, Joe, while my then-girlfriend convinced me to keep Gawain and Tristan.

Gawain died while in Wilmington. He had been sick, came home with some cuts from a fight... my girlfriend let him outside on accident. I never saw him again. When he had disappeared, Guinevere had been gone on a "vacation" (she came back later), so, as before, he had been my favorite.

Tristan disappeared last week. He wasn't my favorite, but he had been my girlfriend's favorite, and I feel a deep and quite strange sense of guilt for having lost him. What makes it worse is that the day he disappeared, I could've sworn I heard a stuck cat meowing from underneath my truck as I drove to work... my dumb ass chalked it up to the radio, but I'll never know for sure, and it makes me ill.

While in Wilmington, Guinevere had given birth to another litter of Galahad's children (he had run away by this time). This litter was named Arthur, Kay, Sagremor, and Isolde. For some odd reason, I kept all of them.

Isolde ran away the day after Guinevere did. I don't know why. Maybe because she was mad that I just spayed her two days prior. I've seen her and Guinevere together once since then, but it was in the middle of the night in an open field a couple of miles from me. They looked healthy, and none of my traps were working, so I forced myself to let them go.

Arthur died early in August of this year. He was sick, and one day decided just to go somewhere and die. I'm still sick to my stomach about it. Guess what? He had been my favorite, too.

Kay and Sagremor are all that are left of my nine cats. The irony here is that, prior to leaving Wilmington, I had decided to get rid of two cats in order to alleviate myself of some of the burden of taking care of so many animals. Guess which two?

I sure am glad that I'm stubborn when it comes to pets.

I was going to tie this story into something relevant, but I've just depressed myself... have a nice day.

Sympathy for a Field Mouse

I love cats. There was a time when I didn't really care for them, but now I love the damn things. I love them so much, I have six. Sure, two of them haven't come home in a few weeks, but that still leaves me with four, and that's still a lot of cats. They're great, have distinct individual personalities, and they're all named after King Arthur characters. Hey, I'm a writer, what can I say?

On the night of July 16, however, my cats seriously pissed me off. For the last few weeks, when the sun goes down, they've been capturing, torturing, and executing field mice. All four of them have been doing it, Arthur and Tristan in particular. They are the reason that I now know that field mice, when tortured, sound like baby birds. I'd rather have never learned that, but I sleep with my window open and the cats prefer to conduct their torture sessions right outside of it.

Arthur, it seems, has exhausted the local supply of adult field mice and is now (along with Tristan) in the habit of "kidnapping" infant field mice from their mothers, all of whom I'm presuming are now dead as well. But last night, I went ape-shit. I heard the chirping of a tortured (and I do mean tortured) field mouse and I rushed outside. Sure enough, three of my cats were out there taking turns swatting, biting, and otherwise scaring the little creature to death. I brushed them aside, picked up the mouse, and headed down the street to hide it somewhere so it could get away... which is when I noticed that its eyes weren't open. The damn thing was still a baby.

Ah, the predicament of animal lovers. I have little sympathy for dying people, but show me a dying animal and I'm there to help in a heartbeat.

What to do? What to do? I couldn't let it go now, for it would die anyway without its mother. And I couldn't take it back to the field, because Arthur and Tristan would most certainly recapture it before any chance of a surrogate mother coming along. Shit out of luck on all counts, Mickey. Well, what could I do but put it in the field and hope for the best? Then I put it in the field again... and again... I swear, if the government would hire my cats to find Osama Bin Laden, he'd be incarcerated by now.

I spent about a half-hour with the little mouse. He had a tiny mole underneath one leg, there was a small remnant of his umbilical cord, and he wasn't yet coordinated enough to walk. Of course, he was so little, he could've been a she, but I'll never know. I admit, I was upset... still am, really. But nature's cruel and my cats are more than willing to prove that to me.

It seems my only option is to close my window. And that kinda sucks.