Psycho Kitty Torture

My childhood cat was put to rest on my birthday this year. She was a crazy, crazy cat and I hold myself partly responsible for that fact, if not completely responsible. I was but a boy when Scooter arrived in our lives and the caterwauling of a cat was like music to my ears. Now don't get me wrong, I never brought any harm to her, no physical harm anyway. I was more prone to psychological tortures: loud and sudden noises, dangling her over our swimming pool, chasing her with a vacuum cleaner. One time I used a spray-canister of temporary orange hair dye to add a little punk to her life. When my mother found out, she was something less than pleased and ordered me to clean poor Scooter off. I threw her in the shower. She was not a happy cat. I, however, was quite pleased with the acoustics the shower provided.

These actions of mine lead her to what some might call anti-social tendencies. It got to the point where, unless you were my Mother who had that sacred bond shared with matriarchs, cats and the moon, you could hardly get near her much less pick her up without her freaking and clawing and generally being impossible to control.

It was so bad that when we took her to be groomed, she was so unruly that the only way they could get the job done was to put her to sleep. She was never the same after that. She seemed to experience bouts of disorientation and hallucinations and even flipped on Mom sometimes. I still wonder what she thought she was seeing when she was walking down the hall, stopped suddenly in terror, swatted at the thin air in front of her then tore ass in the opposite direction. The mind of a cat is a delicate thing.

She lived to be seventeen years old though, arthritis had set in and a seizure rendered her mostly paralyzed which left my sister, who was cat-sitting for the weekend, no choice but to put her down. On my birthday. It must mean something, this subtle reminder of the sins of my youth as I take another step away from them, I just don’t know what.

On a related, unrelated note, the day I left Chicago, probably for good, was the first day since 1999 that someone was not shot and killed. This can only mean two things, either there was a cease fire in my honor or somewhere in Chicago there’s a bullet with my name on it. I’ve already ruled out coincidence.