Catatonic

Catatonic

For some reason, I don’t like cats. When I am around them and when they want to be social, they seem fine, but I am slightly put off by all the things that others generally like about cats. Independence seems to be a big cat theme. They amuse themselves and seem to be less gregarious creatures than not and seem inclined to live more solitary lives, jumping from here to there and then casually walking on as though there is no rush in life worth worrying about. Given the naturally high intensity I generally attribute to cats, I assume that sense of indifference they exude seems to be more of an affectation than anything else. For some reason, I always feel cats are thinking their actions through and are in no way random despite their efforts to look casual and effortless in their manner. When I look into a cats eyes, which admittedly is not that often, I sense that there is a lot going on. That contrasts with a dog, who I always feel shows their emotion of the moment in their eyes, but very little planning or thinking in process. Cats have guile, but dogs are generally wearing their feelings openly on their sleeve. None of this is new thinking, I am sure, but I’m saying it to set a baseline for us to think about cats in a broader context.

When I think of cats I think of lonely women. When I think of dogs I think of playful men. How’s that for stereotyping? I have two bruiser nephews (the sons of Kim’s sister Sharon). Their father, Woo, is a big guy who played rugby, flew helicopters in the Navy and likes single malt whiskey and big nasty cigars (oh yes, and westerns, big open-range cowboy movies). Both father and sons all keep cats. They go by the names of Rod and Todd, Peaches and Pickles and JonJan. That family seems to feel that cats need to be kept in pairs (JonJan’s buddy Pizza has gone on to the catnip in the Sky). They range from totally feral cats that only come home to eat occasionally to apartment cats that are scared to venture out of doors.

Once, when one of the two boys, Will and Josh, or as I used to call them, the Gibroni Brothers, was living with us in New York, which the both did for a while, we got into a discussion about cats. They loved to talk cats with Uncle Rich and liked hiding cat pics on my screensaver. It killed them that I would just erase them and never mention them. At that time, only Rod and Todd existed. They were two feral cats that Will adopted while visiting Josh while he worked as a ranger at Two Harbors on Catalina Island. Did you get that, CATalina Island? Where else would you get cats according to the Gibronis than at the CCC (the CATalina Cat Company). That would start them going in full Gibroni mode riffing about cats and the CCC and how they were going to ride that theme to glory by producing a cartoon that would be a cross between The Simpsons, Family Guy and Bevis & Butthead. I used to go tilt on that riff pretty quickly and I finally just asked what was so great about cats. That played right into their hands and they waxed eloquent but ad nauseam on the topic. I had finally had enough and I said if cats were so great, why had Will left Rod & Todd with Sharon &Woo (mostly Woo) when they came to New York.

Being half-buzzed by then, they took great offense at the suggestion that they had somehow abandoned Rod & Todd for the sake of their young single man’s lifestyle. They contended that keeping cats was a net positive for the young single man on the make and they wished that Rod & Todd were there with them right then. I couldn’t help but call alpha male bullshit on this notion and they were incensed. That’s when I came up with one of my best shrek ideas on the Gibronis. You see, one of the Gibroni traits, borne of necessity, was frugality. The more frugal, the more beer they could afford. Simple math. So, I offered to PAY them $500 to ruin their single guy lives by bringing Rod & Todd east to live with them. I thought this was brilliant. $500 meant little to me (hell, Josh alone could eat that much food in one dinner), but $500 was a meaningful sum to a Gibroni. I was reveling in their pain. Josh was at a loss for words. He started to say, “I’ll do it, man! I’ll do it! Cool.”

Will understood the difficulty of the dynamic. He is older. He was the one who had passed off Rod & Todd to Dad and inherently understood the problems they might cause from transportation to foisting the cats on roommates, to keeping feral cats used to the out of doors in a Brooklyn apartment, to the, ugh, responsibility of it all, Will was getting that shifty-eyed Gibroni-looking-for-an-exit look about him while younger bro Josh was beating his chest and daring me to give him the money. It was a very sweet moment in my “Gibronis I Have Known” history. And then Aunt Kim the fun-killer came into the picture. These were her boys and whether they were right or wrong, drunk or sober, Gibroni or not, I was not to fuck with them in any way and especially not in my normal alpha dog up-your-nose-with-a-rubber-hose way. I had to rescind the offer and could say nothing when Josh said, “I woulda done that deal, bro!” So much for the catenations of Gibronis and cats.

I figure that sooner or later either the Gibronis or the cat world will find a way to get even with me. Last year during a motorcycle ride I thought the moment had come when I stopped atop Mt. Palomar to relieve myself only to find myself twenty feet away from a mountain lion. That ended as a non-event with the feline heading off into the wilderness paying no attention to me. And then again, today I was watering plants before we were scheduled to head off to L.A. when I found myself fifteen feet away from a good-sized bobcat on our play area path. He was equally nonchalant about my presence and it looked like this was his home turf, which agrees with our prior sightings on this and our neighbor property. He was perhaps 35-40 pounds in size and looked totally at ease being seen in bright daylight. He was doing to me what I had done to the Gibronis, daring me to challenge him. As I slowly backed away, I wondered if I would go catatonic if he chose to attack, but then, mustering my inner-Gibroni I said under my breath, “I coulda handled him, bro.”