Hola Amigos, it's been a while since I hollered at ya'...
God I miss Jim Amchower. Go ahead and Google him. He was awesome.
Jesus is their anything worse than the NHL All-Star Game? They've got captains drafting the teams like grade school Dodge Ball. They're on the last two guys, a position I know all too well from my own grade school years . Well who's a high paid attorney now motherfuckers!?!?!?
Oh, right, someone else. Goddamn fate.
Anyway, the NHL All-Star game is a joke, it isn't hockey and I won't watch. I'm not even sure why I'm watching this draft but I'm willing to bet the two Stone IPAs and 2 (3) fingers of 12 year old Jamesons may have something to do with it.
Oh right, the cat.
So anyhoo as all of you, (and by all I mean Eclectic, who apparently still stops by here and yelled at me for not posting anything in like 6 months, so I hope you enjoy this E because you're probably the only one reading this), may know, we have several rescue animals. Including five fish that we've rescued from a pet store, and by 5 I mean like 28, because those things have a half-life of about 6 seconds.
Oh hey, Game of Thrones re-runs on HBO. Hooray for child-rape! At least in the books; in the TV show I think the bride's supposed to be legal. By the way, after watching the first series I ran out and bought the first four books and then read them right through. My advice to you is DO NOT DO THAT. They're excellent, don't get me wrong, but barreling through all four at once is like swallowing 4,000 pages of hate at once. I seriously started to have some foul, foul dreams centered on that shit. But in small doses I'd highly recommend them. Seriously good story-telling.
Oh yeah, the cat.
So my first gift to my then girlfriend, now wife, was a cat. Blaze. Adopted from the Meriden Humane Society. Blaze was with us for about 11 years, including about 5 as an outdoor cat, (declawed, which I won't do again), in which she killed mice, birds, rabbits and I'm pretty sure two hookers. Then, when my father-in-law moved to California and announced that he wouldn't be bringing his cat with him, I adopted Brutus.
On a side-note people when you have a pet it's part of the family. Putting it to sleep because you're moving isn't an option. Don't think I won't remember that when it's time to decide on a nursing home.
So anyway Blaze got hit by a car and died and Brutus got old and we put him to sleep because he couldn't eat or climb stairs, not because we were moving. And we had no cats. This lasted a few years until we started to see mouse shit in the house. My wife decided that we needed a cat. Off to the shelter we go.
At the shelter, (where we got our dog, who's really cool and still has most of her parts), we meet Nutmeg. Nutmeg has been dropped off, riddled with fleas and bearing three kittens, by some shitheel that once passed for a human. We adopt her, based in no small part on the head of the shelter telling us how friendly Nutmeg is.
Well, she lied. Nutmeg is not friendly, she is feral. Although the words sort of sound alike so I guess there could have been some confusion. We find that unless she's outside she's not happy and by not happy I mean "shitting anywhere but her litter-box". So Nutmeg becomes an outdoor cat. And disappears for three days before coming back wounded and needing medical attention. $300 later she's wearing a plastic helmet and is inside for the winter. Spring comes and she's back to shitting under my bed. Back outside for her and all is well. She's actually much friendlier when spending time outside too.
She gets through most of the summer, then disappears again. Now during this time my brother has found a kitten that some asshole threw out of a car, breaking its leg. If you don't know my brother, (and you don't or we'd be friends), he's like a drunken St. Francis; wounded animals flock to the kid and he never says no. I think he has a tab at the vets office, and I know he's got one at the local bar because I've abused the latter on more than one occasion. He names this kitten "Lucky Buster" after some literary character, (I know, who reads books? FAG!!), and takes him, (later to be determined to be a her), to the vets for surgery to get the leg fixed. My wife and daughter, (who you'll remember are now missing a cat), have visited the vets office and fallen in love with Lucky Buster, who I am informed is just the most adorable ball of fluff you'd ever want to see. They agree that we will adopt her once she comes out of surgery.
Naturally she dies during surgery. Lung worms and too much time outside on top of the broken leg. And when I find the fucker who threw her out a window I will crucify them. Oh, and we still get the bill, which I pay, because I've got at least two other animals going in an out of that office.
So now we're out money, have no cat, mice in the house and what are we going to do. Well we're going back to the animal shelter of course. But this time we adopt a kitten and determine that we will raise him as an indoor cat. And we name him Lucky Buster, although lately I've been calling him Handsome Dan, because he just looks like a Handsome Dan, and more importantly because cats don't give a shit what you call them. They're not coming over unless you're holding a tuna steak. And then we drive home and who's sitting at the back door glowering at us? Nutmeg The Great And Terrible. Thank you Stephen King for the latter half of that monikor.
Is this story longer than 'Moby Dick'? I think it might be. I hope you're happy E. thank the flying spaghetti monster that HBO's running porn right now. "Sexy Assassins". This isn't going to end as well for you as you think, fella. But I digress
Nutmeg resumes her outdoor ways and takes up sporadically fighting with Lucky Buster. Who is at first much smaller than her but takes to eating everything in sight and is now bigger, faster and younger than her. And has all of his parts, at least until Monday, but don't tell him that. We're just going for a ride as far as he's concerned.
Nutmeg disappears again this winter, including two of the coldest nights of the year. I basically write her off, but because she's my daughter's cat I launch several expeditions around the area looking for her, even though we heard coyotes within 5o yards of the house on about Night 3, and I'm pretty much just looking for confirmation that Nutmeg isn't coming home.
By the way, if you ever want to impress your wife and/or significant other, charge out on a winter's night in your pajamas to chase off a coyote on the off chance that your cat's in trouble. You won't find the cat but you'll probably get laid. Also the coyotes will run away from an adult. I call that a pro-tip.
Day 12 of missing cat my wife goes outside in the early morning to "watch the first snow", (smoke a cigarette; you know what they say about girls who smoke: marry 'em!), and the next thing I know she's waking me up by thrusting what's left of Nutmeg in my face. Apparently Nutmeg came sprinting across the back yard through the snow. She's got several bad bites and is seriously underweight. But she's alive. Daughter cries with happiness, I go out in the snow and track the footprints, which eventually disappear into some brush, because the snow's already melting because global warming isn't a myth and fuck you if you don't think so.
(poflawa in 3, 2,...oh wait, no one reads this anyway. Never mind)
Anyway, as near as I can tell Nutmeg's been living in a woodchuck hole for 11 days, because there's no possible other shelter near her footprints where she wouldn't have frozen to death. Which makes me thing she also ate the woodchuck, because that cat kills even more than Blaze did. Because Nutmeg got to keep her front claws.
So we're back at the vets, (who by the way found out that I was paying for my brother's original Lucky Buster and were so impressed by that they gave us the money back, thereby allowing us to get the living Lucky Buster's shots for free, with the balance left over that we would soon use on Nutmeg's updated rabies shots), and we clean up Nutmeg and off we go. We take care of Nutmeg's leg wounds and she's doing pretty well.
But her tails starting to smell pretty bad. We go back to the vets. Turns out that something grabbed her tail and broke it in at least two places. No blood is getting through and the tail's dying. She can live, probably, but her tail will rot off slowly. With maggots 'n stuff. And she may die anyway. So we have Nutmeg's tail amputated. And now she's back in the house with a shaved ass, no tail, a startling good view of her genitals, and something of an attitude considering I've spent about $1,000 (1st World Problems) to twice save a stray cat's life.
Fucking felines.
Hope you enjoyed that E.
And Nutmeg, whether she knows it or not, just retired as an outdoor cat.
