[Little Note: Been quiet this week. Did something I really didn't want to do - hard to explain. But I done did it, and now it all did 'n done. I've been sulking a bit. Went out last night for the karaoke with the ex-fiancee. Felt a little better after spinning on the floor on my back while playing the end guitar solo from Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" on my leg. It doesn't undo the suckage, but it distracts from the suckage. In other news, Adam drew a very flattering picture of himself stabbing me in the back with a banana. I don't think the pants are tight enough, but it's pretty accurate in other respects.]
Since moving back to South-East Portland, I've had this little problem with animal poops. This neighborhood is full of hippies who walk their dogs at the end of hemp leashes, and, just like themselves, they allow their animals to conduct their business in a manner inconsistent with proper hygiene.
Nowadays, when an animal makes its poopies on the sidewalk, it's considered polite for the stinky hippie to pick up the poopies in a plastic poop sack. Parisians are exempt from this social expectation.
The hippies don't do this, though, as they consider doggy poopies to be a gift of Nature. If you were to suggest that a hippy scoop the dooky into a bag (or, preferably, if you were to make the hippy eat it), the hippie would say something like, "You fascist! It's all natural, bro! Even Bob Marley made the poopies!"
I would agree with the hippies on all points:
- I am a fascist.
- Poopies are all natural.
- Bob Marley did make the poopies.
However, despite my being in accord with the hippie on these points, it doesn't mean I'm all happy inside about it, and I'd probably have to respond with, "You know what else is all natural? I'm going to punch you in the face."
I step on animal poopies a couple times each week. So often now that I have a routine for de-pooping my shoes. It involves bleach, but I won't go into it right now. There are more important matters at hand.
I've gotten a little tired of stepping on poopies. Sure, I think it's beautiful that Nature regularly manifests itself in the form of compacted fecal matter on the sidewalk, but just as the night guard at the Louvre is probably bored with the Mona Lisa through regular exposure, I could do without so much doody in my life.
My normal interactions with the squishy-doggy-presents are superficial. As I said, the problem is resolved with bleach, but I won't go into it right now.
Today, I had a very different experience.
Today, it was personal.
In the wide open daylight, I looked out my bedroom window. My view is of the backyard. That means that I can see the backyard through my window.
To get to my basement apartment, I walk through a gate at the side of the house, down an alley, and around to my door. The route follows a gravel path. I like for there not to be poopies anywhere on the gravel path. Other people must not know that I don't like poopies there, because I find poopies there. I've always wondered who comes around to deposit poopies on my path.
I found out today.
Most of the time when I look out the window, there aren't any cats on the other side of the glass.
When I looked out the window today, I saw a cat animal. It was cat-shaped and it had hair all over its body. Like us humans, it had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a tail. While I am not a cat expert, I believe that cats use their eyes for seeing, just as we do. This thing was, in every way, exactly how, based on theoretical knowledge derived from the 1965 edition of The Illustrated World Book Children's Encyclopedia, I imagined cats to look. If I remember correctly (it's been about fifteen years since I read that encyclopedia entry), cats can live to be three-hundred years old, and they can squirt venom from their ears in self-defense against bears, which are their natural predators. Although we feed cats processed cow parts (mainly to sate their appetites so they don't look to us to satisfy their appetites), the cat prefers to hunt in packs, often hitting farms. A pack of eight to ten cats can take down a full grown cow in under two-minutes, leaving nothing behind except for the cow's genitals. One cat alone can take a cow on all by itself by biting through the neck to tear open the jugular. The cat holds on and drinks the blood of the cow until the cow collapses and looks kind of like a big hairy raisin. Sometimes the cat doesn't eat the cow carcass, leaving it instead to dry out in the sun. This is where beef jerky comes from. Also, if a cat is old and has dentures and can no longer bite the cow in the neck, it'll jump on the back of the cow and then garrotte the thing with piano wire. The downside to this method is that the cat can't hang on and drink the cow's blood. Taking the cow in this manner is, it's theorized, to demonstrate to the rest of the tribe that, although the cat is an elder (approximately 250+ years old), it's still quite dangerous. Failure to do this results in appearing weak, putting the aged cat at risk of being eaten by the other cats in the tribe. Cats do not appear to have any morals, and they all read pornography.
I tapped on my window. The thing turned around, made eye contact with me, and then walked away.
Two feet later, and just off of the gravel path to my door, the cat stopped. It then aimed its cat bottom directly at my face - not such an odd thing until you consider the other 359 degrees with which it could have oriented itself, the majority of which would not have aimed its alimentary-canal-hole at me - and then got right down to making a doody as though it was pushing out one of those sausage shaped things you can make with the Play-Doh Fun Factory.
It must have been constipated for a few days, only to have found a laxative a couple hours prior. It had to do its thing for a couple minutes straight, being prolific in its art. Not long for a human, but cats don't lock themselves in a room while Doing Their Thing and reading magazines. They're all business, so two cat minutes is like three human hours in the bathroom.
When it finished, it spent the next five minutes building a shrine around its work with sticks and leaves. The bastard was fastidious, leaving a mark to other cats that, not only was this its pooping grounds, but it was a highly intelligent, sentient cat that had built a religion for itself, at the center of which was its excrement.
I can relate to building a religion for oneself, but I don't go to the bathroom in other people's yards. I draw the line at my own yard.
Shrine constructed, the cat came back to my window, sat down at the edge of the sill, and stared me right in the eyes. I'm not kidding. Everything I've learned about cats appears to have been absolutely correct. They pompous little bastards.
While doing that, the rest of its gang showed up. There were two more cats roaming around the yard, steering clear of the perimeter established by the Alpha Cat's shrine.
One of the cats didn't have to go, but the other did. Maybe "have to" isn't the right terminology. I think the cats wanted to go. I don't know what I did to them, but they hate me. They really, really hate me.
Poopage complete, and in a manner that creeped me the hell out, the other cats came over, too. One of them was skittish, and it paced back and forth a few feet away. The other, however, joined Alpha Cat in watching me as though my window was a TV. That's the problem with TV - people sit their cats in front of it, and the cats become complacent. It makes them idiotic, arrogant punks, and this kind of lazy, disrespectful behavior is what will eventually lead them to make videos of each other to put on YouTube of themselves falling out of trees and landing on their private parts while trying to put together a documentary about pooping on my turf.
Artist's Depiction of the Offenders
I think the cats may have all been attached to the same body. One of them was a cyclops.
And, although I'm not certain, I think one of them had a gun.
I've been thinking about how I can keep them away. My first idea is to go around the neighborhood and scoop up all the poop I can find. I'll bring it back to my yard and make an enormous pile of it near, but not too near, my gravel path. The goal is to make the cats think that there is either:
1. One exceptionally large cat whose doodies smell like ten other animals because it swallowed a bunch of other cats and dogs whole and now it's pooples carry the aroma of those other animals.
2. A gang. Tough street dogs and cats looking to bust a cap in some other cat's ass.
I've also considered urinating over the entire backyard, but I don't have to pee that badly, and, to be honest, I'm kind of worried of what the neighbors would think. I don't want to give them the impression that I'm crazy or something just because I come out of my apartment every few minutes to pee on a section of lawn while shaking my fists in the various directions I think might lead to the cats.
It might be easiest to have a Pee Party. I can invite a bunch of my friends over, and we can all pee at once in the yard. It would only require the one session, and nobody would think we were weird. It'd probably just look like we were making a German porn.
I love cats. I love animals. I like them better than people. Once I get my apartment set up, I'm hoping to buy a dog. Specifically, I want to buy a corgi. As a bonus, corgis are sheep dogs, and would get a kick out of herding the cats.
Love for animals aside, it's on. It's me versus the cats.
If the other ideas (with poop and pee) don't work, I'm going to bury C4 rigged with proximity sensors around the yard.
I can only take so much of this. I'm a person; I have feelings.
And right now I feel like rocking these cats all the way to Cat Hell.
[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]
- George Clingerman - Back when I start my public speaking job, George was there to give me friendly, almost stalker-like support. We never see each other anymore, though. That's because he's a bad friend.
- Cliff - Cliff has aggressively challenged me to work on the Facebook project thing with him. Quite a few people have responded, and I don't know how to pick 'em, but this was a pretty attention-getting sorta thing. Oddly, calling me a coward is a good way to get involved in stuff like this. I'm going to write about the project soon. I'm just frozen at the moment by the problem of this who-do-I-pick thing.
- Ben - Ben picked up on something I wrote a while back about innovation - a word tossed around by everybody in the tech industry to the point that, not only has the definition been perverted to the point of being the industry's "smurf" word, but, even when you do hear it, you don't listen - it has no impact anymore. It's like saying, "Visual Studio 2008 enables you to utilize powerful resources to quickly and easily create robust, compelling solutions for your enterprise customers and beyond." I pulled that last bit right out of my head, but after three years at Microsoft, it's not that hard to speak Microsoft White Paper. Great products, but total dipshits at the marketing-wheel. I don't know who's driving, but wherever they're going, it's in the short yellow bus. Steve Ballmer is one of the Great Offenders in this area. He's a brilliant speaker, but it sometimes feels like he's able to make such great impromptu speeches because every third word is "innovation." The other two are "innovate" and "innovated."