Shakespeare and His Cats

And with regard to that neighbor's cat, I am at a loss. We are having a bit of very heavy rain here, which makes me less than favorably disposed to going out (and although I do have a raincoat, I have no idea what a person is supposed to do with her hair, or her shoes), and as it is Sunday (now Sunday night), any work I had is work to do at home. So I mostly, with a couple exceptions, stayed in. Which is where this cat comes in.

Cats have some crazy hold on the psyches of certain people. There is a whole Cat subculture about which I neither know nor wish to know anything. These people buy cat napkin holders, cat toothbrush holders, cat blankets, cat lamps, cat mousepads, and cat 'art', and some, I can only imagine, have probably even seen Cats, not to mention purchased and no doubt enjoyed copies of the too-ghastly-to-contemplate picture-book Shakespeare Cats, in which memorable scenes or characters are needlessly rendered as though being played by - obviously, at this point, I suppose - cats... it's far too painful to elaborate further...

-- Never mind; I can't help myself: they buy up cups with cats on them, cats to pour cream from, cat-embellished shirts, and cat-embellished tea towels. They have Whimsical Cats, and Naughty Cats, and Sensual Cats (usually, of course, panthers, and generally meant to symbolize alongside this austere and capricious sensuality the nexus of feminine-feline and the Sphinx-like opacity [don't pretend you didn't know it was coming; of course it was; it always does] of both), and cats to burn incense in and cats to hold your toilet roll while you sit and stare in amazement and transfixed disgust at the cat holding your toothbrushes...

I have no better explanation for this than you do, and it appears also to be confined largely to one sex. If you start to say, Yes, but women have always been compared to cats, or even, Yes, but women are so, well, feline, so Sphinx-like, aren't they, in either case, I'm not going to punch you or even wish to, but neither of those excuses such appallingly bad taste. Thou canst compare me to a summer's day, if you feel the need (and I sorely doubt that you do, even though I am more lovely and yes more temperate, too, but never mind), and I will be in no greater danger than before of going out and buying cheap prints of Van Gogh's Sunflowers or decorating in chintz. Maybe I am sunny as the smile of the blue firmament, but that doesn't make me incline toward hanging hummingbird feeders in the latrine!

So for me, the Inscrutable Mysteries of the Inscrutable Cat hold no appeal. I am not curious in the slightest why someone should wish to be so mercurial, so self-centred, so obstinate, and so awake at exactly the wrong times. I don't care. Dogs don't do it. Plants don't do it. Even educated clams don't do it.

Today was an endless loop replayed with, for my part, ever-diminishing enthusiasm. The not wanting to sit on his 'special place' followed by savagely attacking the Jetsons chair followed by whines for eating again followed by whines to go out immediately upon which came the sulking outside the door subsequent to which was the biting of the hand that retrieved him (from the rain outside the door, I might add) short upon the heels of which was ignoring the Things to Scratch I'd bought for him in preference to something I had bought for vastly divergent purposes after which came the return of randomly attacking things and knocking perfume bottles off things not designed to be leapt onto...

I freely admit I know nothing about cats. That is one of the reasons I don't have one. Another one is a preference for species that 'make sense' at some level inside my hominid brain. When a dog, for example, stares at his food bowl, or pushes it toward you, you are right in assuming it means, You are fifteen minutes late on the grub, chump, and I'd say I'm never going to forget it but I'm a dog and this will all be irrelevant and, just between us, irretrievable, in about twenty seconds. It never means, Go to the refrigerator and grab something for me and then walk over here because I really want to leap up and bite you in the face.

Clearly, however, there is Not Having One and 'not having one,' the latter of which I fall into now. His real parents leave him outside, whether it is 85 degrees, or snowing, or hailing, or pouring rain. He hides under cars from the sun, or lies on top trying to get some heat: it's not as though I have a choice in this, wrecked weird chair or no. I made him a bed inside the Chinese wedding cabinet, on the lower tier so it was safer, even though it meant I couldn't use it for what I had intended to, or close it. I put a box in there that I painted that said 'Baby' so he would know where to go. I bought him his own hamper to attack once he made it clear he wanted to kill my cute matching set of two, which matched everything in the house, and then relented and gave him one of those when he didn't want the nearly identical one I'd got for him. And then I bought a wrought-iron one for me, so there would be no question...

Still, though -- and this doesn't mean I want anything, ever, in the shape of him -- he is, when he is not trying to rip open my jugular, or nap on my keyboard while I'm typing, or tip over my wine cabinet, or ruin my stockings when I'm trying to put them on, he is, actually, recklessly, unashamedly, murderously cute...

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.